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agricultural revolution

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• British Broadcasting Corporation - History - Agricultural Revolution in England
• World History Encyclopedia - Agriculture in the British Industrial Revolution
• Academia - The Agricultural Revolution: Catalysts and Consequences
• Khan Academy - The Agricultural Revolution

agricultural revolution , gradual transformation of the traditional agricultural system that began in Britain in the 18th century. Aspects of this complex transformation, which was not completed until the 19th century, included the reallocation of land ownership to make farms more compact and an increased investment in technical improvements, such as new machinery, better drainage, scientific methods of breeding , and experimentation with new crops and systems of crop rotation .

Among those new crop-rotation methods was the Norfolk four-course system , established in Norfolk county , England , which emphasized fodder crops and the absence of the theretofore conventionally employed fallow year. Wheat was grown in the first year and turnips in the second, followed by barley , with clover and ryegrass undersown in the third. The clover and ryegrass were cut for feed or grazed in the fourth year. In the winter, cattle and sheep were fed the turnips. The development of Shorthorn beef cattle through selective breeding of local cattle of the Teeswater district, Durham county , typified the advances brought about by scientific breeding.

The historiography of the period that emphasized the contributions of “great men” has lost much of its influence, but the names Jethro Tull and Arthur Young are still frequently invoked by those seeking to understand the significance of the agricultural revolution, which was an essential prelude to the Industrial Revolution .

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Neolithic Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 4, 2023 | Original: January 12, 2018

The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the Neolithic Revolution.

Neolithic Age

The Neolithic Age is sometimes called the New Stone Age . Neolithic humans used stone tools like their earlier Stone Age ancestors, who eked out a marginal existence in small bands of hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age .

Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe coined the term “Neolithic Revolution” in 1935 to describe the radical and important period of change in which humans began cultivating plants, breeding animals for food and forming permanent settlements. The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people from their Paleolithic ancestors.

Many facets of modern civilization can be traced to this moment in history when people started living together in communities.

Causes of the Neolithic Revolution

There was no single factor that led humans to begin farming roughly 12,000 years ago. The causes of the Neolithic Revolution may have varied from region to region.

The Earth entered a warming trend around 14,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Some scientists theorize that climate changes drove the Agricultural Revolution.

In the Fertile Crescent , bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley began to grow as it got warmer. Pre-Neolithic people called Natufians started building permanent houses in the region.

Other scientists suggest that intellectual advances in the human brain may have caused people to settle down. Religious artifacts and artistic imagery—progenitors of human civilization—have been uncovered at the earliest Neolithic settlements.

The Neolithic Era began when some groups of humans gave up the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle completely to begin farming. It may have taken humans hundreds or even thousands of years to transition fully from a lifestyle of subsisting on wild plants to keeping small gardens and later tending large crop fields.

Neolithic Humans

The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements. Studying Çatalhöyük has given researchers a better understanding of the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to an agriculture lifestyle.

Archaeologists have unearthed more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings at the 9,500 year-old Çatalhöyük. They estimate that as many as 8,000 people may have lived here at one time. The houses were clustered so closely back-to-back that residents had to enter the homes through a hole in the roof.

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük appear to have valued art and spirituality. They buried their dead under the floors of their houses. The walls of the homes are covered with murals of men hunting, cattle and female goddesses .

Some of the earliest evidence of farming comes from the archaeological site of Tell Abu Hureyra, a small village located along the Euphrates River in modern Syria . The village was inhabited from roughly 11,500 to 7,000 B.C.

Inhabitants of Tell Abu Hureyra initially hunted gazelle and other game. Around 9,700 B.C. they began to harvest wild grains. Several large stone tools for grinding grain have been found at the site.

Agricultural Inventions

Plant domestication: Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley were among the first crops domesticated by Neolithic farming communities in the Fertile Crescent. These early farmers also domesticated lentils, chickpeas, peas and flax.

Domestication is the process by which farmers select for desirable traits by breeding successive generations of a plant or animal. Over time, a domestic species becomes different from its wild relative.

Neolithic farmers selected for crops that harvested easily. Wild wheat, for instance, falls to the ground and shatters when it is ripe. Early humans bred for wheat that stayed on the stem for easier harvesting.

Around the same time that farmers were beginning to sow wheat in the Fertile Crescent, people in Asia started to grow rice and millet. Scientists have discovered archaeological remnants of Stone Age rice paddies in Chinese swamps dating back at least 7,700 years.

In Mexico , squash cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops emerged around 9,000 years ago.

Livestock : The first livestock were domesticated from animals that Neolithic humans hunted for meat. Domestic pigs were bred from wild boars, for instance, while goats came from the Persian ibex. Domesticated animals made the hard, physical labor of farming possible while their milk and meat added variety to the human diet. They also carried infectious diseases: smallpox, influenza and the measles all spread from domesticated animals to humans.

The first farm animals also included sheep and cattle. These originated in Mesopotamia between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago. Water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after in China , India and Tibet.

Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appeared much later—around 4,000 B.C.—as humans developed trade routes for transporting goods.

Effects of the Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution led to masses of people establishing permanent settlements supported by farming and agriculture. It paved the way for the innovations of the ensuing Bronze Age and Iron Age , when advancements in creating tools for farming, wars and art swept the world and brought civilizations together through trade and conquest.

The Development of Agriculture; National Geographic . The Seeds of Civilization; Smithsonian Magazine .

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Ch. 25 The Industrial Revolution

Effects of the agricultural revolution, 25.1.4: effects of the agricultural revolution.

The increase in agricultural production and technological advancements during the Agricultural Revolution contributed to unprecedented population growth and new agricultural practices, triggering such phenomena as rural-to-urban migration, development of a coherent and loosely regulated agricultural market, and emergence of capitalist farmers.

Learning Objective

Infer some major social and economic outcomes of the Agricultural Revolution

• The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point, allowing population to far exceed earlier peaks and sustain the country’s rise to industrial preeminence. It is estimated that total agricultural output grew 2.7-fold between 1700 and 1870 and output per worker at a similar rate. The Agricultural Revolution gave Britain the most productive agriculture in Europe, with 19th-century yields as much as 80% higher than the Continental average.
• The increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, although domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the 19th century as population more than tripled to over 32 million.
• The rise in productivity accelerated the decline of the agricultural share of the labor force, adding to the urban workforce on which industrialization depended. The Agricultural Revolution has therefore been cited as a cause of the Industrial Revolution. As enclosure deprived many of access to land or left farmers with plots too small and of poor quality, increasing numbers of workers had no choice but migrate to the city. However, mass rural flight did not take place until the Industrial Revolution was already underway.
• The most important development between the 16th century and the mid-19th century was the development of private marketing. By the 19th century, marketing was nationwide and the vast majority of agricultural production was for market rather than for the farmer and his family.
• The next stage of development was trading between markets, requiring merchants, credit and forward sales, and knowledge of markets and pricing as well as of supply and demand in different markets. Eventually the market evolved into a national one driven by London and other growing cities. Commerce was aided by the expansion of roads and inland waterways.
• With the development of regional markets and eventually a national market aided by improved transportation infrastructures, farmers were no longer dependent on their local markets. This freed them from having to lower prices in an oversupplied local market and the inability to sell surpluses to distant localities experiencing shortages. They also became less subject to price fixing regulations. Farming became a business rather than solely a means of subsistence.

Significance of the Agricultural Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point, allowing population to far exceed earlier peaks and sustain the country’s rise to industrial preeminence. Although evidence-based advice on farming began to appear in England in the mid-17th century, the overall agricultural productivity of Britain grew significantly only later. It is estimated that total agricultural output grew 2.7-fold between 1700 and 1870 and output per worker at a similar rate. The Agricultural Revolution gave Britain at the time the most productive agriculture in Europe, with 19th-century yields as much as 80% higher than the Continental average. Even as late as 1900, British yields were rivaled only by Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. But Britain’s lead eroded as European countries experienced their own agricultural revolutions, raising grain yields on average by 60% in the century preceding World War I. Interestingly, the Agricultural Revolution in Britain did not result in overall productivity per hectare of agriculture that would rival productivity in China, where intensive cultivation (including multiple annual cropping in many areas) had been practiced for many centuries. Towards the end of the 19th century, the substantial gains in British agricultural productivity were rapidly offset by competition from cheaper imports, made possible by the exploitation of colonies and advances in transportation, refrigeration, and other technologies.

Social Impact

The increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, although domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the 19th century as population more than tripled to over 32 million. The rise in productivity accelerated the decline of the agricultural share of the labor force, adding to the urban workforce on which industrialization depended. The Agricultural Revolution has therefore been cited as a cause of the Industrial Revolution. As enclosure deprived many of access to land or left farmers with plots too small and of poor quality, increasing numbers of workers had no choice but migrate to the city. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, however, rural flight occurred in mostly localized regions. Pre-industrial societies did not experience large rural-urban migration flows, primarily due to the inability of cities to support large populations. Lack of large employment industries, high urban mortality, and low food supplies all served as checks keeping pre-industrial cities much smaller than their modern counterparts. While the improved agricultural productivity freed up workers to other sectors of the economy, it took decades of the Industrial Revolution and industrial development to trigger a truly mass rural-to-urban labor migration. As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers moved into place, cities began to support larger populations, sparking the beginning of rural flight on a massive scale. In England, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891.

Drawing of a horse-powered thresher from a French dictionary (published in 1881).

The development and advancement of  tools and machines decreased the demand for rural labor. That together with increasingly restricted access to land forced many rural workers to migrate to cities, eventually supplying the labor demand created by the Industrial Revolution.

New Agricultural Market Trends

Markets were widespread by 1500. These were regulated and not free. The most important development between the 16th century and the mid-19th century was the development of private marketing. By the 19th century, marketing was nationwide and the vast majority of agricultural production was for market rather than for the farmer and his family. The 16th-century market radius was about 10 miles, which could support a town of 10,000. High wagon transportation costs made it uneconomical to ship commodities very far outside the market radius by road, generally limiting shipment to less than 20 or 30 miles to market or to a navigable waterway.

The next stage of development was trading between markets, requiring merchants, credit and forward sales, and knowledge of markets and pricing as well as of supply and demand in different markets. Eventually the market evolved into a national one driven by London and other growing cities. By 1700, there was a national market for wheat. Legislation regulating middlemen required registration, and addressed weights and measures, fixing of prices, and collection of tolls by the government. Market regulations were eased in 1663, when people were allowed some self-regulation to hold inventory, but it was forbidden to withhold commodities from the market in an effort to increase prices. In the late 18th century, the idea of “self regulation” was gaining acceptance. The lack of internal tariffs, customs barriers, and feudal tolls made Britain “the largest coherent market in Europe.”

Commerce was aided by the expansion of roads and inland waterways. Road transport capacity grew from threefold to fourfold from 1500 to 1700. By the early 19th century it cost as much to transport a ton of freight 32 miles by wagon over an unimproved road as it did to ship it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

With the development of regional markets and eventually a national market aided by improved transportation infrastructures, farmers were no longer dependent on their local markets and were less subject to having to sell at low prices into an oversupplied local market and not being able to sell their surpluses to distant localities that were experiencing shortages. They also became less subject to price fixing regulations. Farming became a business rather than solely a means of subsistence. Under free market capitalism, farmers had to remain competitive. To be successful, they had to become effective managers who incorporated the latest farming innovations in order to be low-cost producers.

Attributions

• “British Agricultural Revolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Rural flight.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Urbanization.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Enclosure.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Industrial Revolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Batteuse_1881.jpg.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Batteuse_1881.jpg . Wikipedia Public domain .
• Boundless World History. Authored by : Boundless. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Women harvest wheat with sickles in Tras os Monte, Portugal.

What was the Neolithic Revolution?

Also called the Agricultural Revolution, the shift to agriculture from hunting and gathering changed humanity forever.

The Neolithic Revolution—also referred to as the Agricultural Revolution—is thought to have begun about 12,000 years ago. It coincided with the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene . And it forever changed how humans live, eat, and interact, paving the way for modern civilization.

During the Neolithic period , hunter-gatherers roamed the natural world, foraging for their food. But then a dramatic shift occurred. The foragers became farmers, transitioning from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one.

Why settle down?

Though the exact dates and reasons for the transition are debated, evidence of a move away from hunting and gathering and toward agriculture has been documented worldwide. Farming is thought to have happened first in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where multiple groups of people developed the practice independently . Thus, the “agricultural revolution” was likely a series of revolutions that occurred at different times in different places.

A farmer winnows grain in a field near the Pyramid of Meidum, in Egypt.

There are a variety of hypotheses as to why humans stopped foraging and started farming. Population pressure may have caused increased competition for food and the need to cultivate new foods; people may have shifted to farming in order to involve elders and children in food production; humans may have learned to depend on plants they modified in early domestication attempts and in turn, those plants may have become dependent on humans. With new technology come new and ever-evolving theories about how and why the agricultural revolution began.

Regardless of how and why humans began to move away from hunting and foraging, they continued to become more settled. This was in part due to their increasing domestication of plants. Humans are thought to have gathered plants and their seeds as early as 23,000 years ago , and to have started farming cereal grains like barley as early as 11,000 years ago. Afterward, they moved on to protein-rich foods like peas and lentils. As these early farmers became better at cultivating food, they may have produced surplus seeds and crops that required storage . This would have both spurred population growth because of more consistent food availability and required a more settled way of life with the need to store seeds and tend crops.

Animal domestication

As humans began to experiment with farming, they also started domesticating animals. Evidence of sheep and goat herding has been found in Iraq and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) as far back as about 12,000 years ago. Domesticated animals, when used as labor, helped make more intensive farming possible and also provided additional nutrition via milk and meat for increasingly stable populations.

A man on a donkey leads sheep down a path in Syria.

The agricultural revolution had a variety of consequences for humans. It has been linked to everything from societal inequality —a result of humans’ increased dependence on the land and fears of scarcity—to a decline in nutrition and a rise in infectious diseases contracted from domesticated animals. But the new period also ushered in the potential for modern societies—civilizations characterized by large population centers, improved technology and advancements in knowledge, arts, and trade.

Related Topics

• SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
• ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
• ANCIENT PERSIA

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• Study Notes
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AP U.S. History Notes

• Chapter Outlines
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• Sample Essays
• Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865-1896
• The Indians stood in the path of the advancing white pioneers (threatened bison population)
• The Cheyenne and Sioux on horses transformed themselves into nomadic traders and hunters
• White intruders spread cholera, typhoid, and smallpox among the native peoples of the plains
• The federal government tried to pacify the Plains Indians (competition for hunting grounds)
• They established boundaries for the territory for each of the tribes (“colonies of the north”)
• Native Americans actually lived in scattered bands recognizing no authority outside
• The federal government intensified this policy and herded the Indians into still smaller confines
• Indians surrendered their land only when they received promises that they would be left alone
• In the 1860s fierce warfare between the Indians and U.S. Army raged in the West
• Colonel Chivington’s militia massacred Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864
• In 1866 a Sioux war party attempted to block construction of the Bozeman Trail
• They ambushed Fetterman’s command and the Indians left not a single survivor
• In the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) the government abandoned the Bozeman Trail and the “Great Sioux reservation” was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes
• Custer found gold in South Dakota but the Plains Indians massacred his militia
• Chief Joseph finally surrendered after leading his band of Nez Perce Indians for 1,700 miles
• Led by Geronimo, they were pursued into Mexico by federal troops (finally captured)
• The relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites shattered the spirit of the Indians
• The Native Americans were ghettoized on reservations—they were then largely ignored
• The taming of the Indians was by the railroad, white people’s diseases, and no more buffalo
• The buffalo were the staff of life for Native Americans—for food, tools, clothing, etc
• With the building of the railroad, the massacre of the herds began in deadly earnest
• Creatures were slain for hides, choice cuts, or even for sheer amusement
• By 1885, only about a thousand buffalo were alive in the West
• MA writer Helen Hunt Jackson inspired sympathy for Indians ( A Century of Dishonor ,  Ramona )
• Humanitarians wanted to treat the Indians kindly and persuade them to take up white man’s life
• Hard-liners insisted on the current policy of forced containment and brutal punishment
• Neither side showed much respect for the Native American culture (Sun dance, Ghost Dance)
• The act dissolved many tribes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land and set up individual Indian family heads—full citizenship was granted to all Indians in 1924
• In the 1890s the government expanded its network of Indian boarding schools and sent “field matrons” to the reservations to teach Native American women sewing and virtues
• The Dawes Act struck directly at tribal organization; was the cornerstone of Indian policy
• Under these federal policies, the Indian population started to mount slowly
• The golden gravel of California continued to yield “pay dirt” and Colorado had its discovery
• People poured into Nevada in 1859 after Comstock Lode had been uncovered—gold and silver
• Boomtowns sprouted form the desert sands like magic and disappeared quickly
• The operation could be undertaken only by corporations (pooled wealth of stockholders)
• The age of big business came to the mining industry—attracted population and wealth
• Women and men found opportunity and won a kind of equality on the frontier that earned them the vote in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and “Idaho before the beginning of the 20 th  century
• The outpouring of silver and gold enabled the Treasury to hold up the credit
• Texas cowboys drove herds slowly over the plains until they reached markets (Long Drive)
• Breeders learned to fence their ranches, produce fewer animals, and organize
• Many more families purchased their land from the railroads, land companies, or states
• The Homestead Act was quite the hoax—much of the 160 acres was in rain-scarce Great Plains
• The railways played a major role in developing the agricultural West (marketing of crops)
• But once the soil was broken up, the earth proved astonishingly fruitful
• The 100 th  meridian running through the Dakotas to Texas separated two climatologically regions; a well-watered area to the east and a semiarid area to the west of the line
• The method consisted of frequent shallow cultivation supposedly adapted to the arid West
• Tough strains of wheat, resistant to cold and drought, were imported from Russia
• Federally financed irrigation projects caused the Great American Desert to bloom
• The Great West experienced a fantastic growth in population from the 1870s to the 1890s
• New Western states joined the Union; CO, ND, SD, MT, WA, ID, WY, UT (Republican votes)
• Oklahoma boasted 60,000 inhabitants in one year and became the Sooner State in 1907
• Jackson Turner’s  The Significance of the Frontier in American History  (1893)
• The government set aside land for national parks: Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite (1890)
• Americans had been notorious for their mobility; land was often the most profitable crop
• Western cities were the real safety valves (people found ways to seek their fortunes)
• In the trans-Mississippi West, the Native Americans made their last desperate struggled against colonization and there most Native Americans live today—Pacific to Asia
• Farmers were intimately tied to banking, railroading, and manufacturing (twine binder, combine)
• Agricultural modernization drove many farmers off the land swelling ranks of industrial workers
• The farm was attaining the status of a factory—an outdoor grain factory
• California fruit and vegetable sold at a handsome profit in the rich urban markets of the East with the advent of the railroad refrigerator car in the 1880s
• Bankruptcy fell on lie blight and grain prices depended on the world market of grain
• The deflationary pinch on the debtor flowed partly from the static money supply
• Ruinous rates of interest were charged on mortgages (eastern loan companies)
• Farm tenancy rather than farm ownership was spreading fast throughout the nation
• Insects ravaged the crops, floods added to the waste of erosion, and expensive fertilizers needed
• Their land was overassessed, and they paid painful local taxes (high protective tariffs)
• Farmers were at mercy of the harvester trust, all of which could control output and raise prices
• The railroad octopus had grain growers in its grip—high freight rates
• They did manage to organize a monumental political uprising
• Prices sagged in 1868, and a host of farmers unsuccessfully sought relief by demanding inflation
• The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (Grange, 1867) led by Oliver H. Kelley
• Kelley wanted to enhance lives of isolated farmers through social, education, fraternal activities
• Kelley found that farmers were receptive to passwords, rituals, and hierarchy
• Grangers raised their goals from self-improvement to improvement of farmer’s collective plight
• Grangers also went into politics (regulate railroads through state legislation)
• Granger Laws—public control of private business for general welfare (bitterly attacked)
• Following the  Wabash  decision of 1886, the Grangers’ influence faded
• Farmer’s grievances found a vent in the Greenback Labor Party (1878, also elected Weaver)
• Manifestation of rural discontent came through the Farmers’ Alliance founded in TX, 1870s
• The farmers wanted to break the grip of the railroads and manufacturers through cooperative
• The Alliance weakened by ignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers, sharecroppers
• In the 1880s a Colored Farmers’ National Alliance emerged to attract black farmers
• Out of the Farmers’ Alliances a new political party—the People’s Party AKA Populists
• They called for nationalizing of railroads, instituting an increasing income tax, creating a new federal “subtreaty” for the farmers, and free and unlimited coinage of silver (inflation)
• William Hope Harvey’s  Coin’s Financial School  (silver)
• The queen of the Populists was Mary E. Lease known as the “Kansas Pythoness”
• In 1892, the Populists jolted the traditional parties be polling more than 1 million votes
• The panic and depression of 1893 strengthened the Populists’ argument that farmers and laborers alike were being victimized by an oppressive economic and political system
• Ragged armies of the unemployed began marching to protest their plight
• Jacob Coxey set out for Washington in 1894 to demand government relieve unemployment
• General Coxey and his lieutenants were arrested for walking on the grass
• The Pullman strike of 1894 in Chicago was headed by Eugene Debs (American Railway Union)
• Workers finally struck the Pullman Palace Car Company (lower wages, same rent)
• The American Federation of Labor declined to support the Pullman strikers (“respectability”)
• U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney called for dispatch of federal troops and his legal grounds were that the strikers were interfering with the transit of the U.S. mail
• Federal troops crushed the Pullman strike and Debs was sentenced to prison for 6 months
• This was the first time that such a legal weapon had been used by Washington to break a strike
• Monetary policy loomed as the issue on which the election of 1896 would turn
• William McKinley of Ohio (R) supported by Marcus Hanna (believed gov’t should aid business)
• Republicans had the money of Hannah and leaned toward hard-money policies (support tariff)
• Cleveland was the most unpopular man in the country (more like a Republican)
• William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech got him nominated for the Democrats
• The platform demand inflation through unlimited coinage of silver
• Democratic “Gold Bugs” unable to swallow Bryan bolted their party over the silver issue
• With the ratio of 16 oz Ag to 1 oz Au, most Populists decided to vote for the Bryan
• William Jennings Bryan swept through 27 states and made nearly 600 speeches (even East)
• Free silver became almost as much a religious as a financial issue (silver cure people in debt)
• Bryan created panic among eastern conservatives with his threat of converting holdings lower
• Hanna shook trusts and plutocrats and piled up enormous campaign money ($16 million)
• Fear was Hanna’s strongest ally, as it was Bryan’s worst enemy
• McKinley triumphed decisively taking the populous East and the Presidency
• The results demonstrated Bryan’s lack of appeal to unmortagaged farmer and eastern laborer
• The outcome was a resounding victory for big business, the big cities, middle-class values, and financial conservatism—last effort to win White House with mostly agrarian votes
• Future of presidential politics lay in the cities with their growing populations
• The smashing Republican victory of 1896 heralded a Republican grip on the White House for sixteen consecutive years—long reign accompanied by diminishing voter participation, the weakening of party organizations, and fading away of issues like money and civil service reform
• Concern for industrial regulation and the welfare of labor (political era—fourth party system)
• McKinley’s cautious, conservative nature caused him to shy away from banner of reform
• The tariff issue forced itself to the fore—the Wilson-Gorman law did not raise enough revenue
• Dingley Tariff Bill of 1897 proposed new higher rates and finally with additions was at 46.5%
• Prosperity began to return with a rush in 1897; the Gold Standard Act of 1900 provided that the paper currency be redeemed freely in gold (over last-ditch silverite opposition)
• Discoveries of new gold deposits brought huge quantities of fold onto world markets, as did the perfection of the cheap cyanide process for extracting gold for low-grade ore
• Moderate inflation took care of the currency needs

You just finished Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865-1896 . Nice work!

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More apush chapter outlines.

• Chapter 2: The Planting of English America, 1500-1733
• Chapter 3: Settling the Northern Colonies, 1619-1700
• Chapter 4: American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1692
• Chapter 5: Colonial Society on the Eve of Revolution, 1700-1775
• Chapter 7: The Road to Revolution, 1763-1775
• Chapter 8: America Secedes from the Empire, 1775-1783
• Chapter 9: The Confederation and the Constitution, 1776-1790
• Chapter 10: Launching the New Ship of State, 1789-1800
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The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions

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• 1 - The Agricultural Revolution
• 2 - The Industrial Revolution: The Transportation Revolution
• 3 - The Industrial Revolution: The Factory System and Technology
• 4 - The Industrial Revolution: Social Impact and Legacies
• 5 - Primary Source: Andrew Ure The Philosophy of Manufacturers
• 6 - Primary Source: Two Women Miners
• 7 - Attributions
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The Agricultural Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution was the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. It preceded the Industrial Revolution and is often considered one of its causes. The Agricultural Revolution was linked to such new agricultural practices as crop rotation, selective breeding, and more productive use of arable land.

Learning Objectives  

Examine the foundations of the Agricultural Revolution in Britain.

Analyze the social and technological impact of the Agricultural Revolution on the British classes.

Key Terms / Key Concepts  

Agricultural Revolution: a period of agricultural reform in England that produced numerous technological inventions and techniques  

Enclosure: The process that ended traditional rights on common land and restricted land use to the property owner

General Enclosure Act of 1801 : an early piece of English legislature sanctioning the practice of enclosure 

Threshing machine : a piece of farm equipment that separates grain seeds from stalks and hulls

The Agricultural Revolution 

The Agricultural Revolution was the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain due to increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. Agricultural output grew faster than the population over the century up until 1770; thereafter productivity remained among the highest in the world. This increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, and domestic production gave way to food imports in the 19th century as population more than tripled to over 32 million. The rise in productivity accelerated the decline of the agricultural share of the labor force, adding to the urban workforce on which industrialization depended. The Agricultural Revolution has, therefore, been cited as a cause of the Industrial Revolution. However, historians also continue to dispute whether the developments leading to the unprecedented agricultural growth can be seen as “a revolution,” since the growth was, in fact, a result of a series of significant changes over a long period of time. Consequently, the question of when exactly such a revolution took place and of what it consisted remains open.

Crop Rotation and New Industrial Tools

One of the most important innovations of the Agricultural Revolution was the development of the Norfolk four-course rotation, which greatly increased crop and livestock yields by improving soil fertility and reducing fallow.

Crop rotation is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same area in sequential seasons to help restore plant nutrients and mitigate the build-up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one plant species is continuously cropped. Rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility by alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants. The Norfolk System rotates crops so that different crops are planted with the result that different kinds and quantities of nutrients are taken from the soil as the plants grow. An important feature of the Norfolk four-field system was that it used labor at times when demand was not at peak levels. 

Townshend is often mentioned—together with Jethro Tull, Robert Bakewell, and others—as a major figure in England’s Agricultural Revolution, contributing to the adoption of agricultural practices that supported the increase in Britain’s population between 1700 and 1850.

An important factor of the Agricultural Revolution was the invention of new tools and advancement of old ones, including the plough, seed drill, and threshing machine, to improve the efficiency of agricultural operations.

The mechanization and rationalization of agriculture was a key factor of the Agricultural Revolution. New tools were invented and old ones perfected to improve the efficiency of various agricultural operations.

In his 1731 publication, Jethro Tull described how the motivation for developing the seed drill arose from conflict with his servants. He struggled to enforce his new methods upon them, in part because they resisted the threat to their position as laborers and skill with the plough. He also invented machinery for the purpose of carrying out his system of drill husbandry, about 1733. His first invention was a drill-plow to sow wheat and turnip seed in drills, three rows at a time.

A threshing machine or thresher is a piece of farm equipment that threshes grain: removes the seeds from the stalks and husks by beating the plant to make the seeds fall out. Before such machines were developed, threshing was done by hand with flails and was very laborious and time-consuming, requiring about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. Mechanization of this process removed a substantial amount of drudgery from farm labor. The first threshing machine was invented circa 1786 by the Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle, and the subsequent adoption of such machines was one of the earlier examples of the mechanization of agriculture. 

Eighteenth-Century Threshing Machine. 

The Enclosure Acts

Enclosure  is the process that ended traditional rights on common land formerly held in the open field system and restricted the use of land to the owner; Enclosure is one of the causes of the Agricultural Revolution and a key factor behind the labor migration from rural areas to gradually industrializing cities.

Background: Common Land 

Common land is owned collectively by a number of persons, or by one person with others holding certain traditional rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect firewood, or to cut turf for fuel. A person who has a right in or over common land jointly with others is called a commoner. Originally in medieval England, the common was an integral part of the manor and thus part of the estate held by the lord of the manor under a feudal grant from the Crown or a superior peer, who in turn held his land from the Crown, which owned all land. This manorial system granted rights of land use to different classes.  A commoner would be the person who, for a time, occupied a particular plot of land.

Most of the medieval common land of England was lost due to enclosure. In English social and economic history, enclosure was the process that ended traditional rights, such as mowing meadows for hay or grazing livestock on common land formerly held in the open field system. Once enclosed, these uses of the land became restricted to the owner and the land ceased to be for the use of commoners. Under enclosure, such land was fenced (enclosed) and deeded or entitled to one or more owners. The process of enclosure became a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century. By the 19th century, unenclosed commons were largely restricted to large areas of rough pasture in mountainous places and relatively small residual parcels of land in the lowlands.

Implementation of the Acts

The more productive enclosed farms meant that fewer farmers were needed to work the same land, leaving many villagers without land and grazing rights. Many moved to the cities in search of work in the emerging factories of the Industrial Revolution. Others settled in the English colonies. English Poor Laws were enacted to help these newly poor. Some practices of enclosure were denounced by the Church and legislation was drawn up against it. However, the large, enclosed fields were needed for the gains in agricultural productivity from the 16th to 18th centuries. This controversy led to a series of government acts, culminating in the General Enclosure Act of 1801 , which sanctioned large-scale land reform.

The Act of 1801 was one of many parliamentary enclosures that consolidated strips in the open fields into more compact units and enclosed much of the remaining pasture commons or wastes. Parliamentary enclosures usually provided commoners with some other land in compensation for the loss of common rights, although the “other land” was often of poor quality and limited extent. They were also used for the division and privatization of common “wastes” (in the original sense of uninhabited places), such as fens, marshes, heathland, downland, and moors.

Consequences

The primary benefits to large land holders came from the increased value of their own land, not from expropriation. Smaller holders could sell their land to larger ones for a higher price, post enclosure. Protests against parliamentary enclosures continued, sometimes also in Parliament, frequently in the villages affected, and sometimes as organized mass revolts. Enclosed land was twice as valuable, as a higher price could be sustained by its higher productivity. While many villagers received plots in the newly enclosed manor, for small landholders this compensation was not always enough to offset the costs of enclosure and fencing. Many historians believe that enclosure was an important factor in the reduction of small landholders in England as compared to the Continent, although others believe that this process began earlier.

Enclosure faced a great deal of popular resistance because of its effects on the household economies of smallholders and landless laborers. Common rights had included not just the right of cattle or sheep grazing but also the grazing of geese, foraging for pigs, gleaning, berrying, and fuel gathering. During the period of parliamentary enclosures, employment in agriculture did not fall but failed to keep pace with the growing population. Consequently, large numbers of people left rural areas to move into the cities where they became laborers in the Industrial Revolution.

Enclosure is considered one of the causes of the British Agricultural Revolution. Enclosed land was under the control of the farmer, who was free to adopt better farming practices. There was widespread agreement in contemporary accounts that profit-making opportunities were better with enclosed land. Following enclosure, crop yields and livestock output increased while at the same time productivity increased enough to create a surplus of labor. The increased labor supply is considered one of the factors facilitating the Industrial Revolution.

Effects and Significance of the Agricultural Revolution

The increase in agricultural production and technological advancements during the Agricultural Revolution contributed to unprecedented population growth and new agricultural practices, triggering such phenomena as rural-to-urban migration, the development of a coherent and loosely regulated agricultural market, and the emergence of capitalist farmers.

The Agricultural Revolution proved to be a major turning point, allowing the population to far exceed earlier peaks and sustain the country’s rise to industrial preeminence. During the nineteenth century, improved technology helped agriculture output soar not only in England but also throughout much of Europe and North America. England’s position as the leading industrial-agricultural nation eroded as European countries experienced their own agricultural revolutions, raising grain yields on average by 60% in the century preceding World War I. Interestingly, the Agricultural Revolution in Britain did not result in overall productivity per hectare of agriculture that would rival productivity in China, where intensive cultivation (including multiple annual cropping in many areas) had been practiced for many centuries. Towards the end of the 19th century, the substantial gains in British agricultural productivity were rapidly offset by competition from cheaper imports, which were made possible by the exploitation of colonies and advances in transportation, refrigeration, and other technologies.    

The Development of Agriculture

The development of agricultural about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.

Social Studies, World History

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The Farming Revolution Taking root around 12,000 years ago, agriculture triggered such a change in society and the way in which people lived that its development has been dubbed the “ Neolithic Revolution.” Traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, followed by humans since their evolution, were swept aside in favor of permanent settlements and a reliable food supply. Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population rocketed—from some five million people 10,000 years ago, to eight billion today.

There was no single factor, or combination of factors, that led people to take up farming in different parts of the world. In the Near East , for example, it’s thought that climatic changes at the end of the last ice age brought seasonal conditions that favored annual plants like wild cereals . Elsewhere, such as in East Asia, increased pressure on natural food resources may have forced people to find homegrown solutions. But whatever the reasons for its independent origins, farming sowed the seeds for the modern age.

Plant Domestication

The wild progenitors of crops including wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), barley ( Hordeum vulgare ), and peas ( Lathyrus oleraceus ) are traced to the Near East region. Cereals were grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago, while figs ( Ficus carica ) were cultivated even earlier; prehistoric seedless fruits discovered in the Jordan Valley suggest fig trees were being planted some 11,300 years ago. Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain.

The origins of rice and millet farming date to the same Neolithic period in China. The world’s oldest known rice paddy fields, discovered in eastern China in 2007, reveal evidence of ancient cultivation techniques such as flood and fire control.

In Mexico, squash cultivation began around 10,000 years ago, but corn ( maize ) had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, teosinte. While maize -like plants derived from teosinte appear to have been cultivated at least 9,000 years ago, the first directly dated corn cob dates only to around 5,500 years ago.

Corn later reached North America, where cultivated sunflowers ( Helianthus annuus ) also started to bloom some 5,000 years ago. This is also when potato ( Solanum tuberosum ) growing in the Andes region of South America began.

Farmed Animals

Cattle ( Bos taurus ), goats ( Capra hircus ), sheep ( Ovis aries ), and pigs ( Sus domesticus ) all have their origins as farmed animals in the so-called Fertile Crescent , a region covering eastern Turkey, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. This region kick-started the Neolithic Revolution. Dates for the domestication of these animals range from between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Genetic studies show that goats and other livestock accompanied the westward spread of agriculture into Europe, helping to revolutionize Stone Age society. While the extent to which farmers themselves migrated west remains a subject of debate, the dramatic impact of dairy farming on Europeans is clearly stamped in their DNA. Prior to the arrival of domestic cattle in Europe, prehistoric populations weren’t able to stomach raw cow milk. But at some point during the spread of farming into southeastern Europe, a mutation occurred for lactose tolerance that increased in frequency through natural selection thanks to the nourishing benefits of milk. Judging from the prevalence of the milk-drinking gene in Europeans today—as high as 90 percent in populations of northern countries such as Sweden—the vast majority are descended from cow herders.

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The Agricultural Revolution: From the Neolithic Age to a New Era of Agricultural Growth Research Paper

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The introduction

The conclusion, works cited.

So, first of all, I would like to point out that Neolithic Revolution is one of the most interesting technological discoveries of pre-history. The discovery of tools is recognized to be one of the most important events of human development, as it is a well-known fact that “The development of tools such as flint points, axes, weapons such as the spear and the bow and arrow, snares, and hooks is a reflection of the change from gathering and scavenging to hunting” (“Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture” 1).

Another important point of humans’ development is recognized to be control of fire. Generally, I suppose that this aspect is of great importance as fire provided people of the Neolithic Age with heat and light.

On the other hand, the discovery of fire helped people to cook food. In my opinion, this aspect is very important, as at that time numerous food items were not only unpalatable, but also unsanitary. The most significant discovery of humankind is considered to be the way to preserve fire.

On the other hand, one may point out that another key technique people became familiar with is getting fire due to combustion processes. For this reason, I suppose that one can make a conclusion that Neolithic Revolution is the key moment in the history of humans’ development.

Finally, another important aspect of the age is considered to be the invention of agriculture. This process includes domestication of various wild animals, management of plants, etc. Generally, when talking about the invention of agriculture, one is to make a conclusion that the dawn of profound social changes had started in times of Neolithic Age.

It is said that “Agriculture was adopted repeatedly and independently in various parts of the world after the retreat of the Pleitocene ice around 12,000 years ago” (“Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture” 1). The discovery of the wheel is another important event, which is to be highlighted. Thus, this invention marked the beginning of the so-called mechanical revolution.

Stages of human development

Generally, the stages of human development include hunting and gathering, use of wild grains, and Neolithic agricultural revolution. The last point is characterized by the so-called New Stone Age, farming, domestication of dogs, goats, and other wild animals. Numerous social consequences also took place.

The Neolithic Age and Agricultural Revolution

This period started 10,000 years ago. The Neolithic Age is mostly associated with “the use of polished stone implements, development of permanent dwellings,

cultural advances such as pottery making, domestication of animals and plants, the cultivation of grain and fruit trees, and weaving” (“Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture” 1). On the other hand, the definition of the Neolithic Revolution is mostly related to farming appearance. When bronze tools appeared, this period was called the late period of revolution; or, in other words – the Late Neolithic Period.

Origins of agriculture are still quite ambiguous. To understand the precise origin of agriculture, one is to analyze numerous aspects, including various ecological types, a mind climate, hunting and fishing aspects, flora, etc. “The spread of early agricultural techniques led to new advances as new plant forms were carried to new environments” (“Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture” 1).

The earliest tools were made from stones. Generally, they say that the first traces of agricultural development were obvious on the territory of the Fertile Crescent. As far as I know, Israel and Iraq are considered to be modern areas of agricultural development.

Adze and axe 7000 BCE – 5000 BCE

The process of domestication can’t be neglected and requires some more attention. Thus, there is an opinion that domestication took place for religious reasons. For instance, various ceremonies and rituals were held to worship Gods as well as to present them with gifts.

Christopher Paik is of the opinion that in time of the Neolithic Age “the regions of fertile lands also adopted agriculture early, and they also developed more extractive institutions; the regions that had less suitable lands for agriculture on the other hand adopted agriculture later and developed less extractive institutions” (4).

On the other hand, domestication can be also explained by certain climatic changes. “In agricultural societies children are assets, so once the decision is made to depend on agriculture, populations inevitably increase and the economy becomes locked into agriculture” (“Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture” 3). Finally, I would like to point out that nomadism can also explain agricultural development. In other words, there is certain interdependence between hunting and farming.

Generally, the major points of the Neolithic Revolution are food raising, settled life (it includes the construction of villages, towns, and first cities), new technologies, and social organization.

(“The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution” 12)

Fertile Crescent, South Asia, East Asia, Central America, Egypt, Vietnam, etc. are considered to be the most well-known areas of agriculture development. The earliest near East town were Ain Ghazal (Jordan), Jericho (in our days, it is modern Palestine), and Catal Huyuk (in our days, it is contemporary Turkey).

Demographic changes are also recognized to be rather important. Thus, I would like to tell a few words about this aspect. So, it is necessary to point out that the availability of food items influenced higher populations. In this respect, some extra points can be added.

For instance, sedentary mode of life permitted more children. On the other hand, this mode of life also caused various illnesses. The illnesses were spread from animals. Of course, taking into account people’s constant interactions, one can point out that the diseases caused epidemics.

So, another important aspect I would like to highlight is related to the so-called social transformation. This aspect includes increasing organization (families, large societies, chiefdoms, states), social stratification (some food producers appeared, – they provided societies with food items; craft specialization, religious elites, hereditary rulers, slavery, gender discrimination), welfare of separate societies or groups.

The fist states are also to be considered. Various chiefdoms competed for domination. Thus, the first states were formed. The functions of the state were to resolve internal disorders, to protect the state from external threats, and to redistribute resources. Finally, the basic elements of civilization were political institutions, organized religion, administrative centers, hierarchical system of classes, taxation, specialization of labor, technological development, trade, and the last step – writing.

The Agricultural Revolution: New Era

In the untimely part of the 18 th century, several farmers had narrow pieces of land that they would cultivate and generate their food (Snell 62). This system had several limitations among them being wastage of land the banks of earth that divided the narrow pieces of lands. Moreover, the drainage system for these lands was poor, and since the farmers had little knowledge on land fertility, they had to leave some land fellow every four years to improve their fertility.

This means that here was no agricultural revolution because this practice persisted for an unusually long period. Besides, the general modifications in farming were extremely slow. The problem with that was that food production remained constant while the population increased. Therefore, some people begun to experience food shortages, which meant that something had to be done.

However, in early 19 th century, farmers begun to encompass new farming methods such as Norforlk Crop rotation system, which helped them, eliminate the problems of land fallow. The land was split in four portions with different crops planted in them (Bellis par. 6).

The crop that would be produced in each section would be rotated so that distinct nutrients would be consumed from the land. For example, in one year, crop such as turnips would be cultivated and in the second year, barley cultivated on the same land piece turnips crops, which in turn, replaces the barleys in their initial land. In the third year, a grass crop replaces the barley and in the fourth year wheat grown in the field.

This process helped the farmers grow some crops for profits such as wheat and barley. As the demand of food rose, individuals began to make modifications to the types of farming machines they used in their farms among them being the threshing and drilling machines (Bellwood 27).

These types of inventions accompanied with field enclosure method, facilitated agriculture to grow swiftly and generate adequate food for the increasing population. Other inventions such as the plow, creation of large-scale agricultural generation potential and leading agrarian communities led to the agricultural revolution that generated an alteration of human society.

The revolution had such a massive significance on society that several individual refer to as the “dawn of civilization.” It was during the same era when the plow was discovered that the writing, wheel and numbers were also discovered (Snell 201).

The agricultural revolution drew more attention on the changes that occurred because of the domestication upheaval that lengthened the evolution effects even further in community. The following figure shows the breakdown of radical changes that occurred during agricultural revolution.

In time of the revolution era, stratification appeared as the principal feature of social life. This integration of authority and resources finally led to the establishment of the state as the wealthy and authoritative established institution of the state to consolidate their gains even further (Bellis par. 3).

The farmers of early days in America had poor agricultural equipments that could not lead to incredible harvest. Agricultural plows that Roman farmers had were better than the American farmers’ plows. By description, a plow (others call it plough) refers to farm equipment with one or several blades that smashes the soil and cut a furrow for spreading seeds (Cohen 35).

So, while analyzing the above-mentioned facts, one can state that agricultural development began a long time ago with acceleration and pressure from the increasing population that increased the demand of food. The agricultural revolution was mainly on the farming tools that reduced labor and increased production.

Bellis, Mary. The Agricultural Revolution : Introduction to the Agricultural Revolution , 2012. Web.

Bellwood, Peter. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies . Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishers, 2004. Print.

Cohen, Mark Nathan. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Print.

Neolithic Revolution and the Discovery of Agriculture , n.d., Web.

Paik, Christopher. Historical Underpinnings of Institutions: Evidence from the Neolithic Revolution , 2010. Web.

Snell, K.D.M. Annals of the Labouring Poor, Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900. Cambridge University Presslocation: Cambridge, UK, 1985. Print.

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution , n.d., Web.

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• The Bronze Age: A Move From Neolithic to Iron Age
• The Agricultural Revolutions: Timeline, Causes, Inventions
• The history of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent
• Papyrus: Its Invention and Impact on the World
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• Chichen Itza Archeologic Site
• Comparisons of Early Greek and Early Roman Cultures
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• > Climate Change and the Course of Global History
• > Agricultural Revolutions

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Evolution and Earth Systems
• Part II Domestication, Agriculture, and the Rise of the State
• 3 Agricultural Revolutions
• 4 The Mid-Holocene, the Late Neolithic, and the Urban-State Revolution
• 5 Human Well-Being from the Paleolithic to the Rise of the State
• Part III Ancient and Medieval Agrarian Societies
• Part IV Into the Modern Condition
• Data Bibliography: Full Citations for Data Used in Figures and Tables

3 - Agricultural Revolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

The origins of agriculture lay in the sudden end of the Pleistocene, as the cold, dry glacial world, after some climate oscillations, gave way to the warm, wet Holocene that has sheltered humanity ever since. After spreading thinly across African and Eurasian grasslands during the last stages of the Pleistocene, humanity suddenly settled down in villages and began to produce – rather than simply to forage for – the sustenance of survival. This was what we have called since the days of the great archaeologist V. Gordon Childe the agricultural revolution or the Neolithic revolution . This was the much debated “moment” of domestication, as plants, animals, and people themselves were transformed by a synergy of human action and natural contingency to forge a radically new configuration of human behavior and natural ecology. The result would be an accelerating growth of human numbers, and the emergence of an entirely new set of tensions between humanity and nature.

We call this a “revolution” in the human circumstance, but such terms depend on your perspective. In geological and evolutionary time, the emergence of settled life and agricultural production was certainly a revolutionary transformation. If we imagine the 5 million years of human evolutionary time as a twenty-four-hour period, the entire 300,000 years of modern humanity comprises about an hour and a half, the 135,000 years since modern humans may have left Africa comprise about a half hour, and the 12,000 years since the end of the Pleistocene and its aftershocks comprise slightly more than four minutes. Against a similar twenty-four-hour clock of the geological time of evolving earth systems since 4.6 billion years ago, these epochs are even more minute: about six seconds since the emergence of modern humanity, one second since the first successful departure from Africa, and a few nanoseconds since the end of the ice ages.

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• Agricultural Revolutions
• John L. Brooke , Ohio State University
• Book: Climate Change and the Course of Global History
• Online publication: 05 August 2014
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139050814.006

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15 Minute History

15 Minute History is a history podcast designed for historians, enthusiasts, and newbies alike.

Episode 86: Rethinking the Agricultural “Revolution”

Thousands of years before recorded human history, anthropologists have traced the evolution of human society from a nomadic hunter-gatherer phase to the rise of agricultural practices, which allowed people to stay settled in one place, form complex societies, and ultimately early civilizations. This transition, it is said, was so momentous that it has become known as the Agricultural Revolution. A few decades ago, however, a scholar posited that humans lost leisure time in the process, becoming virtual slaves to their new agricultural lifestyles that required hours of maintenance daily. This counterargument declared that the Agricultural Revolution was nothing less than the greatest disaster to ever befall mankind.

“Not so fast!,” says our guest this week. Rachel Laudan, a renowned food historian and author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History , argues that this thesis, which has found a champion in Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs & Steel , fails to take food preparation into account. Our interview offers a different perspective and raises some new questions about the social impact of the beginnings of agriculture.

Today, we’re going to be talking about a recent hypothesis that’s come up in relation to the agricultural revolution–which is a prehistoric topic, we don’t have any written records about it–that suggests that the agricultural revolution might not have been the Great Leap Forward that it was always believed to have been for mankind. So, I’m going to start off by asking if you could just very briefly describe what the agricultural revolution was, and what the traditional understanding of what that did for human development was.

The name agricultural revolution was introduced in the early 20th century by the renowned Marxist archaeologist and historian Gordon Child to describe the transition of human beings from a stage in which they obtain their food by hunting and gathering to a stage in which they obtained most of their food by farming, as he saw it, and this is indicated by the word “revolution.” It had two features. One was that it was a relatively quick and dramatic event. And the other was that it was a great leap forward in human history. Because following the shift to farming mankind, humankind quickly move to cities, states, and the whole growth of what we tend to call civilization. Both of those positions have been challenged in recent years. Almost nobody now believes that the agricultural revolution was a rapid event, it’s usually assumed now to have taken thousands of years because it is such a difficult shift to make. But perhaps more interesting for this podcast, the idea that it was a great step forward has also come under serious attack.

I first encountered this actually, during initial discussions about doing this podcast, and I found an entry on your blog, which is linked to on our website –that it’s now been posited that this was actually something of a disaster. And I find that really remarkable. What is the critique, or the hypothesis, that’s being put forward now?

The critique also came from anthropologists who were looking at hunter-gatherer societies that are still around in the world today, and they decided that these hunter gatherers had a life, comparatively speaking, of leisure. Unlike the poor modern worker who has to go to the office or to work from nine to five, five days a week, stereotypically hunter-gatherers, it seemed, only have to work for two or three days to collect all the food they needed. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlings, who was a leading figure from Chicago, called the period before the agricultural revolution, the “original affluent society”–affluent because people could get everything they needed to live with relatively little work.

Normally, I try not to offer my opinion during an episode. But I’m finding this a bit of a stretch.

Well, there was detailed work some of the work. The most important work was carried out by Richard Borshay Lee in the Kalahari Desert among the !Kung San or the Bushmen, as they’re normally called in popular parlance, and he went down there for a number of months and he studied what they did and he found that they left camp in the morning on two or two and a half days a week and return to camp in the evening with enough mongongo nuts to sustain them during the rest of the week.

Okay. So as a hypothesis, is this generally accepted? What is–as a food historian, what is your take on that?

Well, it is widely accepted. Many of your listeners may have read a book by another anthropologist Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel , which I think is widely used in high schools. And Jared Diamond, prior to writing that book, asked the question “ Was the agricultural revolution, the worst disaster in the history of the human race ?”

–the worst disaster–

–the worst disaster in the history of the human race. And this came out in Discover magazine, which is widely read, it was a very easily readable essay, and this has become very much the common opinion. Now, I think that you can only get away with this if you have a very funny notion of food. And you have a very funny notion of work.

For example, you mentioned the, I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce the name of the Kalahari tribesfolk. Apparently, they’re living entirely on these nuts.

Almost entirely. There are a few other things, they will catch some small animals, there are insects, there are some other fruits and plant materials, but the mongongo nut is the staple of their diet. Now, what I think is wrong with this analysis is that anthropologists were only paying attention to the collection of the mongongo nuts. Now a mongongo nut is a very, very hard nut. And we can tell you some stories about how you can soften it a moment if you like. But in order to eat a mongongo nut you have to get the shell off. And the shell if you think of a Brazil nut, or a black walnut, or a macadamia nut, it’s a very, very hard shell. So you have to heat the mongongo nut in the fire to soften the shell. And then you have to crack the mongongo nut. Now you might say so cracking a few nuts, who cares? But the meat inside the nut, the actual nut itself is tiny. It’s smaller than a marble, and it’s all twisted into the shell, just like a pecan is, so that to get enough actual nut meat to fill your belly, you are going to have to be cracking an awful lot of mongongo nuts. And when I went back and looked at the work that Lee did in the Kalahari, it turned out that it took eight hours a week just to crack the mongongo nuts. So you’ve got a whole extra day of work in there just cracking.

And that’s before you’ve prepared any of the other foodstuffs.

That’s before you’ve prepared any other food stuffs, it’s before you have collected the wood for the fire, it is before you have gone off and collected the water that you need to drink, which is very time consuming in the Kalahari. And traditionally, the largest container you had was an ostrich egg, which, although it’s fairly big, you’ve got to carry a lot of water in ostrich eggs to have enough for a whole camp. So when you do the calculations, and you add in food processing, and all the ancillary work to food processing, that is firewood, water, and so on, it turns out that these together run between 30 and 40 hours a week. So if you add that on to the gathering of the mongongo nuts, you have a total work week of six to seven eight-hour days, not the two-and-a-half that the anthropologists praise when they talk about a life of leisure.

One also has to presumably take into account that life expectancy was not particularly long, and that the availability of food could not be guaranteed in a hunter gatherer society.

There was always uncertainty about where their food was coming from. And there was always a hungry season. Mongongo nuts, for example, store fairly well, but towards the end of the year you are running out of a ready supply of mongongo nuts. No, it wasn’t a paradise. But for me, as a food historian, I think this is symptomatic of a huge gap that we have in history at the moment. There is a vast literature on and discussion of the history of agriculture. What hard work it is how plowing and sewing and harvesting your crops is a very laborious and energy intensive activity.

But where do we have the discussions about what happens after harvest, because we don’t eat plants, we don’t eat harvests. We don’t eat animals, we don’t eat animal carcasses. We only eat those when they have been turned into something edible and turning harvests and carcasses into something edible in the research I have done always, as in the case of the mongongo nuts, takes longer than the collection of farming of food in the first place. So I think we have to begin to look seriously at the enormous labor that humans took on once, unlike animals, they began to eat food that have been transformed from the natural state.

So what what did happen with the preparation of food, when you move from this hunter gatherer phase into a an agricultural phase, where you’re actually controlling what’s grown?

Again, I think we have to rethink the agriculture revolution. nobody would farm unless they knew how to turn what they farmed into food. And what they farmed initially, in most parts of the world, was grains, the seeds of annual herbaceous plants. Now, grains are a very mixed blessing, they grow abundantly, they can be harvested every year, they are tiny and hard, because they’re the seeds for the next year. So they store very well, much better than mongongo nuts, for example. So those are all the benefits. And another benefit is that they are one of the most nutritionally complete kinds of foods, because they are the food for new plants.

The trouble is because they are tiny, and because they are hard as nails, literally turning them into food is enormously laborious. With the agricultural revolution, somebody had to take on the business of turning wheat, or barley, or corn or rye, oats, into food. And that means grinding. And so far as I am able to ascertain, both from experiments with grind stones, observing modern women grinding and the historical record for a family of four, it would take a woman about five hours a day to grind the grains. Now, think about the implications of that, for history. If you are to have rulers who do not grind, somebody has to be grinding for them. If you are to have women raising families, and they’re spending five hours a day grinding, and then they have to collect firewood and war, they have no option of doing anything else with their lives, essentially, except grind. And that is a stunning historical fact that I think we really need to come to terms with.

Do we have any sense of what the division of labor might have been in the hunter gatherer phase to compare it to? Or do we know?

Historians are–

–We don’t.

–are just not asking these questions. And my mission, or one of my missions is to persuade archaeologists and historians to look very seriously of the question of who is doing these transformations that make the raw materials of food into something we can actually put in our mouths, and how long it takes them, and how much energy it takes. Because I think a lot of the origins of inequality lie here. I think a lot of differences between different societies lie here. I think even the origins of large organized labor lie here because a court for example, a ruler has a court and if he has a court, he has to have a kitchen staff of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, many of whom a large proportion of whom doing nothing but grind for the ruling class, as well as growing.

I know, as late as the 18th, 19th century, it was estimated in the Ottoman Empire that for every person who lived in Constantinople, there had to be three people producing full time to support one resident in the city.

Exactly. And they are not counted. And there’s going to be another three doing nothing but preparing the food.

Exactly, exactly. This is this is so fascinating. And we could we could, we could stay here all day talking about this, but keeping an eye on the clock and are a general format. But I would definitely urge any listeners who are interested in this topic. You have a wonderful blog at your website, Rachellaudan.com , as well as your book Cuisine and Empire which I’ve been reading for the last week, which is absolutely fascinating read, it’s it’s easy to dip into and out of and, and it brings a whole new dimension to world history.

More Resources

Rachel Laudan’s web site

“ Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake? Not If You Take Food Processing into Account .”—the post on Rachel’s blog that inspired this episode (lots of photos and links — we won’t steal them; you should go read for yourself!)

“ The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race ,” 1987 article in Discover Magazine by Jared Diamond presenting the argument later laid out in Guns, Germs & Steel .

Related Episodes

• Episode 89: Seven Skeletons
• Episode 64: Monumental Sculpture of Preclassic Mesoamerica
• Economic and Business History
• Latin America
• North America
• Science, Technology, and Medicine

From Hunters to Settlers: How the Neolithic Revolution Changed the World

• Read Later  

The archaeological understanding of the Neolithic Revolution (or First Agricultural Revolution) has changed significantly since research on the subject first began in the early 20th century. This change from hunter-gatherer groups to agrarian communities seems to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, and with it came huge population growth. But it is still not clear exactly what initiated this change, or whether agriculture led to larger communities or the reverse.

Neolithic Settlers

It is now known that humans were already living in permanent settlements as hunter-gatherers before the emergence of true plant and animal domestication. However, the reason for the shift to agriculture is not entirely understood. An increasingly popular suggestion is that pressure to adopt agriculture came from the prior existence of relatively large permanent settlements, which contradicts the traditional view that agriculture led to large permanent settlements in the ancient Near East.

It is now known that humans were already living in permanent settlements as hunter-gatherers before the emergence of true plant and animal domestication. ( earthchangesmedia.com )

Did Climate Change Prompt the First Agricultural Revolution?

One of the earliest explanations for why agriculture developed when it did was climate change. An early hypothesis, proposed by V. Gordon Child, was that desiccation of the Levant created a scarcity of food requiring humans to learn to grow their own food to survive.

• New Study Indicates that Europe Owes Ancestry and Agriculture to Early Anatolian Farmers
• Rising Inequality Began with Agriculture and Domestication of Plants and Animals

One problem with climate change being the main cause is that the development of agriculture was already underway before the climate began to change significantly at the end of the Pleistocene around 11,000 BP. Just before the rise of true plant and animal domestication, humans in the Levant were practicing a form of “proto-agriculture” as early as 11,500 BP. These proto-agriculturalists were harvesting wild grain and managing wild animals prior to their domestication, which is required for true agriculture and animal husbandry. It is at least unclear that domestication of plants and animals was mainly in response to climate change rather than some other factor.

A Neolithic grinding stone for grain. ( José-Manuel Benito Álvarez/ CC BY SA 2.5 )

Agriculture was already in development before the climate changed in the Levant. It is possible that the primary factors in the rise of agriculture may have been social instead of environmental. Recent archaeological evidence reveals the existence of settled villages as early as 23,000 BP. These early settlements were not true farming communities, but small villages of hunter-gatherers consisting of just a handful of huts. They were nonetheless at least semi-permanent and larger than settlements that had come before them.

Chicken or Egg?

Recent archaeological research shows the slow development of semi-permanent to permanent settled communities over the past 15,000 to 20,000 years. This suggests that rather than agriculture leading to large permanent settlements, it may have been the other way around. The emergence of increasingly larger settled communities may have led to the necessity of agriculture.

Climate probably did still play a role. For example, the shift from the Pleistocene to the Holocene did result in climatic changes, which may have made the environment less abundant, forcing Levantine communities to adopt full scale farming and animal husbandry because foraging and proto-agriculture could no longer sustain their settled way of life. The reason for the rise of agriculture, however, may have been to preserve large settled communities that were already existing - as opposed to allowing for the emergence of large settled communities that had not previously existed.

Early farmers. ( Out of the Woods )

A Cultural Cause

This brings up another question: if an agricultural revolution was not what initially led to densely populated settlements and social complexity, then what did? Why didn’t agriculture arise earlier in the 100,000 years since the emergence of behaviorally modern humans? One possibility that has been suggested by some archaeologists is that something happened in human cultural evolution that made larger permanent communities easier to form and this prompted the Neolithic revolution.

Population Increase and Social Complexity

Increase in population necessarily results in an increase in social complexity. For example, in slightly more modern times, once there is a large population of people living together who are not related, it is necessary for courthouses, police forces, and other third parties to ease conflict resolution since it is less likely that there will be someone related to one or both parties who can mediate the conflict.

• Beekeeping may go back to the early years of agriculture, up to 9,000 years ago
• Ancient Skeletons Change History: Farming Invented Multiple Times Across the Globe

As a result, greater social complexity, such as third-party institutions, is required for groups beyond a certain size to be sustainable. It is possible that large densely populated settlements didn’t exist before about 15,000 years ago because humans had not yet developed third party institutions not based on kinship to mediate conflicts between unrelated individuals that could cause the group to disintegrate.

‘The dawn of civilization - Egypt and Chaldaea’ (1897). ( Public Domain ) Third party institutions are necessary to make the various aspects of a civilization work and to mediate conflicts.

Around 70,000-100,000 BP, the earliest art emerged in Africa and then spread to Eurasia and eventually to Australia and the Americas. It is not clear what caused this, but one hypothesis is that a rewiring of the human brain occurred without changing the physical appearance of Homo sapiens - that made Homo sapiens capable of producing art and advanced tools which do not appear earlier in the archaeological record.

It is possible that something comparable happened 15,000-20,000 years ago that allowed humans to gather into larger social groups and, therefore, allowed for large, permanent settlements. It may have been the invention of third-party social institutions not based on the family which were able to mediate conflicts within large groups of unrelated individuals. It could also have been some sort of advance in cognition enabled by cultural adaptation. Whatever it was, it appears that the increase in settlement size and social complexity were already well underway when true agriculture and animal husbandry appeared in human prehistory.

Egyptians with domesticated cattle and corn circa 1422-1411 BC. ( Public Domain )

Top Image: Ancient farmers. Source: Heritage of Japan

By  Caleb Strom

Watkins, Trevor. "New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia." Antiquity 84.325 (2010):

North, Douglass C., and Robert Paul Thomas. "The first economic revolution." The Economic

History Review 30.2 (1977): 229-241.

Sherratt, Andrew. "V. Gordon Childe: archaeology and intellectual history." Past & Present 125

(1989): 151-185.

Zeder, Melinda A. "The origins of agriculture in the Near East." Current Anthropology 52.S4

(2011): S221-S235.

Opps, misposted, I thought I was posting to the article about yorkshire neolithic farmers!

There is an easy way to determine the way of life of Yorkshire Farmers, speak to them, they haven't changed very much in millennia. Go on their land, they have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later (stones, arrows or shot, whatever is available). People consider the potters wheel leading to a wheeled vehicle, but I wonder if a mill for grain came first.

Caleb Strom is currently a graduate student studying planetary science. He considers himself a writer, scientist, and all-around story teller. His interests include planetary geology, astrobiology, paleontology, archaeology, history, space archaeology, and SETI.

Related Articles on Ancient-Origins

The Agricultural Revolution

I can explain the significance of the Agricultural Revolution.

Lesson details

Key learning points.

• Agriculture in England before 1700 was not very productive.
• Farmers and landowners developed more profitable farming techniques during the 18th century.
• The use of fertiliser and field drainage meant farmers could grow more crops.
• The Agricultural Revolution increased food production, encouraged migration and increased profits.

Common misconception

Students assume the Agricultural Revolution was predominantly facilitated by changes in technology.

Farming tech in common use didn't change much. Improvements in agriculture occurred mainly because of the use of new farming methods.

Agriculture - the work and methods of growing crops and looking after animals that are then used for food

Fallow - if farmland is left fallow, it is not planted with any crops

Arable - land which is suitable and used for growing crops

Enclosure - the practice of turning land owned by a group of people into fenced off land owned by a single person

Fertiliser - a substance that you put on land in order to make plants grow well

Content guidance

• Depiction or discussion of sensitive content

Supervision

Adult supervision recommended

This content is © Oak National Academy Limited ( 2024 ), licensed on Open Government Licence version 3.0 except where otherwise stated. See Oak's terms & conditions (Collection 2).

Starter quiz

6 questions.

enclosure -  

landlords fenced off fields and farmed on a larger scale

drainage -  

areas like the Fens had some of the water pumped out

crop rotation -  

the plants grown on each field were changed each year

use of fertiliser -  

manure was used to add more nutrients to the soil

Additional material

The British Agricultural Revolution

How it works

• 1.1 Protestant Reformation
• 1.2 Boston Massacre
• 1.3 Mayflower Compact

Agricultural Revolution

The British Agricultural Revolution, or Second Agricultural Revolution, was the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain due to increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries The Agricultural Revolution was a period of technological improvement and increased crop productivity that occurred during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. In this lesson, learn the timeline, causes, effects and major inventions that spurred this shift in production. The Agricultural Revolution got its start in Great Britain in the early 18th century and spread throughout Europe and America by the 19th century.

This was a period of significant agricultural development marked by new farming techniques and inventions that led to a massive increase in food production.

Historians have often labeled the first Agricultural Revolution (which took place around 10,000 B.C.) as the period of transition from a hunting-and-gathering society to one based on stationary farming. During the 18th century, another Agricultural Revolution took place when European agriculture shifted from the techniques of the past. New patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields, a greater diversity of wheat and vegetables and the ability to support more livestock. These changes impacted society as the population became better nourished and healthier. The Enclosure Acts, passed in Great Britain, allowed wealthy lords to purchase public fields and push out small-scale farmers, causing a migration of men looking for wage labor in cities. These workers would provide the labor for new industries during the Industrial Revolution.

Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a major 16th century European movement aimed initially at reforming the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Its religious aspects were supplemented by ambitious political rulers who wanted to extend their power and control at the expense of the Church. The Reformation was a movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, there was no schism until the 1521 Edict of Worms. Because of corruption in the Catholic Church, some people saw a need to change the way it worked. The Protestant reformation triggered the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In general, Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 theses at Wittenberg is seen as the start of the Protestant Reformation. This happened in the year 1517. The major causes of the protestant reformation include that of political, economic, social, and religious background. The religious causes involve problems with church authority and a monks views driven by his anger towards the church. Martin Luther was dissatisfied with the authority that clergy held over laypeople in the Catholic Church. Luther’s Protestant idea that clergy shouldn’t hold more religious authority than laypeople became very popular in Germany and spread quickly throughout Europe Reformation, also called Protestant Reformation, the religious revolution that took place in the Western church in the 16th century. … Having far-reaching political, economic, and social effects, the Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity.

Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre, known to the British as the Incident on King Street, was a confrontation on March 5, 1770 in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. The event was heavily publicized by leading Patriots such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. The Boston Massacre was a deadly riot that occurred on March 5, 1770, on King Street in Boston. It began as a street brawl between American colonists and a lone British soldier, but quickly escalated to a chaotic, bloody slaughter. The conflict energized anti-Britain sentiment and paved the way for the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a “patriot” mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry.

Prior to the Boston Massacre the British had instituted a number of new taxes on the American colonies including taxes on tea, glass, paper, paint, and lead. These taxes were part of a group of laws called the Townshend Acts. The colonies did not like these laws. They felt these laws were a violation of their rights. Just like when Britain imposed the Stamp Act, the colonists began to protest and the British brought in soldiers to keep order. The Boston Massacre was a signal event leading to the Revolutionary War. It led directly to the Royal Governor evacuating the occupying army from the town of Boston. It would soon bring the revolution to armed rebellion throughout the colonies.

Mayflower Compact

The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the male passengers of the Mayflower, consisting of separatist Puritans, adventurers, and tradesmen. The Puritans were fleeing from religious persecution by King James of England. The Mayflower Compact was a set of rules for self-governance established by the English settlers who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower. When Pilgrims and other settlers set out on the ship for America in 1620, they intended to lay anchor in northern Virginia. But after treacherous shoals and storms drove their ship off course, the settlers landed in Massachusetts instead, near Cape Cod, outside of Virginia’s jurisdiction. Knowing life without laws could prove catastrophic, colonist leaders created the Mayflower Compact to ensure a functioning social structure would prevail.

Pilgrim leaders wanted to quell the rebellion before it took hold. After all, establishing a New World colony would be difficult enough without dissent in the ranks. The Pilgrims knew they needed as many productive, law-abiding souls as possible to make the colony successful. With that in mind, they set out to create a temporary set of laws for ruling themselves as per majority agreement. On November 11, 1620, 41 adult male colonists, including two indentured servants, signed the Mayflower Compact, although it wasn’t called that at the time. It’s unclear who wrote the Mayflower Compact, but the well-educated Separatist and pastor William Brewster is usually given credit.

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Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent & Mesopotamia

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The ancient Near East , and the historical region of the Fertile Crescent in particular, is generally seen as the birthplace of agriculture . The first agricultural evidence comes from the Levant , from where it spread to Mesopotamia , enabling the rise of large-scale cities and empires in the region.

In the 4th millennium BCE, this area was more temperate than it is today, and it had fertile soil, two great rivers (the Euphrates and the Tigris), as well as hills and mountains to the north.

The Origins of Agriculture

The birth of agriculture was a pivotal moment in human history that allowed the earliest civilizations to arise in the Fertile Crescent. Despite it being called the "Cradle of Civilization ", we now know that agriculture (and human civilization) also arose independently in other regions of the world. In central America, people domesticated maize and beans, and rice and millet and pigs were first domesticated in China , both without knowledge of earlier advances in the Near East.

The advent of agriculture occurred gradually in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey , western Iran, and the Levant, most likely because the region happened to be home to a wide range of plants and animals that lend themselves to domestication and human consumption. Fig trees were cultivated in modern-day Jordan by around 11,300 BCE. Wheat and goats were domesticated in the Levant by 9000 BCE, followed by peas and lentils in the Fertile Crescent and northern Egypt around 8000 BCE and olive trees in the Eastern Mediterranean by 5000 BCE.

Cattle was first domesticated around 8500 BCE, most likely from wild ox (aurochs) in the Near East. Based on recent genetic analyses of ancient cattle bones, it is estimated that all modern cattle in the world is descended from as few as 80 animals that were originally domesticated.

Horses were domesticated in the western Eurasian steppe by 4000 BCE and spread to the Near East at some point in the late 3rd millennium BCE. Grapevines were domesticated in modern-day Iran around 3500 BCE and spread to the Levant and Egypt by 3000 BCE, marking the end of the transition to agriculture. Even today, 90% of our calories come from foods that were domesticated in this first wave of the agricultural revolution.

Agriculture started most likely because hunter-gatherers who collected grains would have had to take them back to their camp in order to separate the grain from the chaff. During this process, some seeds inevitably fall to the ground. When humans returned to the same campsite the next year, cereals would be growing around the campsite, which they harvested again, causing more seeds to fall. As the amount of cereals around the site increased, the people stayed longer to harvest, eventually turning into semi-nomads with seasonal villages, such as the Natufian culture that flourished circa 12500-9500 BCE.

Over time, some of these semi-nomads decided to stay in their agricultural villages year-round to cultivate cereals, while others would continue as nomads. By 8500 BCE, the Middle East was home to many permanent villages whose inhabitants were primarily farmers. The agricultural revolution had begun. With the increase in food production from agriculture, more human life could be sustained, populations increased, and villages turned into cities that gave rise to the Mesopotamian civilizations. The historian Gwendolyn Leick writes:

By the seventh millennium BCE, the alluvial plains began to be cultivated, and by the fourth millennium, the first cities appeared in response to the need for an efficient agricultural administration. The first documents, pictographs written on clay, concerned the allocation of labor for fields and the distribution of the products. (Leick, 6)

It is important to note that the Fertile Crescent is not the only origin point of agriculture, but that there are other places all over the world where agriculture and the domestication of animals arose without any contact with the Fertile Crescent. Scholar Yuval Noah Harari writes:

Scholars once believed that agriculture spread from a single Middle Eastern point of origin to the four corners of the world. Today, scholars agree that agriculture sprang up in other parts of the world not by the action of Middle Eastern farmers exporting their revolution but entirely independently. People in Central America domesticated maize and beans without knowing anything about wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East. South Americans learned how to raise potatoes and llamas, unaware of what was going on in either Mexico or the Levant. China's first revolutionaries domesticated rice, millet and pigs. America's first gardeners were those who got tired of combing the undergrowth for edible gourds decided to cultivate pumpkins. New Guineans tamed sugar cane and bananas, while the first West African farmers made African millet, African rice, sorghum and wheat conform to their needs. (Chapter 5)

Geography of the Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent is an ancient geographic region comprised of three primary geographic zones:

• Mesopotamia, mostly located in modern-day Iraq, defined by the alluvial plain of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris
• Upper Mesopotamia in the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros mountains in the north
• The Levant, in modern-day Syria , Lebanon, Israel , Jordan, and Palestine on the Mediterranean seaboard to the west

Due to its varied geography, agriculture in the Fertile Crescent was highly diverse in terms of food sources, regional crop yields, and annual rainfall or irrigation variation (agricultural production could be up to 100 times higher in particularly good years). There were two types of agriculture:

• Dry agriculture without irrigation, where people mostly cultivated cereals and relied on rainfall, which was primarily practiced in the hill country of upper Mesopotamia and the Levant.
• Irrigation agriculture, which was centered in the alluvial plains of Lower Mesopotamia.

Agricultural Advancements

Many harvests were destroyed by drought or flooding. Initially, people developed agriculture in the rainier hilly areas that ensured a more even spread of precipitation throughout the year. As people moved into the floodplains, new agricultural techniques were required.

Artificial irrigation was a key innovation, which underwent significant improvement over time. At first, irrigation was conducted by siphoning water directly from the Tigris-Euphrates river system directly onto the fields using small canals and shadufs – crane-like water lifts that have existed in Mesopotamia since c. 3000 BCE. From the mid-first millennium BCE there is evidence of larger canal networks and reservoirs, most likely organized by the state, requiring interregional cooperation and planning. Fields were often long and narrow, with the narrow edges bordering the canals to maximize irrigation efficiency.

The Urartians were the masters of canal building, and many of their irrigation systems still exist today. The main canals were generally created and maintained by the state and the small ones by the farmers themselves or the local communities. Irrigated farmland, as is still the case today, was under constant threat of salination.

With the rise of centralized power structures and improving technology, aqueducts were introduced to carry water over long distances. The Jerwan aqueduct , the oldest known aqueduct in the world, was constructed by King Sennacherib I of Assyria between 703 and 690 BCE.

The soil, particularly in the floodplains in the arid climate of Babylonia and Assyria, was prone to dry up, harden, and crack. To keep the soil arable, the plow had to be used. By 3000 BCE plows were known and in wide use – many Assyrian kings boasted to have invented a new, improved type of the plow.

The fields were worked with the help of oxen and a crew of laborers, which grew in size when hired hands were added to the labor force for harvest in spring. The tools used were simple, including sickles with flint blades and paddles for threshing. Wooden plows were likely invented in the 4th millennium BCE, and plows that sowed seeds into the ground were invented by the 2nd millennium BCE.

Due to a Sumerian "Farmer's Almanac", dated to 1700 BCE, we know that Mesopotamians already understood crop rotation and left fields fallow to maintain the fertility of the ground. The practice of using manure to fertilize the soil does not appear to have been known yet, though.

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Mesopotamian Crops

The main types of grain that were used for agriculture were barley, wheat, millet, and emmer. Rye and oats were not yet known for agricultural use. In Babylonia, Assyria, and the Hittite lands, barley was the main grain for human use, primarily because it is reasonably salt-tolerant (an important consideration when irrigating crops in the summer heat). It was a widely-used form of payment, and flatbread was made from barley. The smallest unit of weight was the equivalent of one grain (1/22 g). Beer and luxury foods were made from wheat and emmer. Wheat played a minor role as it was less salt-resistant than barley.

Other agricultural products include sesame (derived from the Akkadian word šamaššammu ), which was widely cultivated and used to make oil. Olive oil was produced in the mountains. Flax was used to make linen cloth. Peas were cultivated in Mesopotamia, while lentils were preferred in Palestine. Figs, pomegranate, apple, and pistachio groves were found throughout the Fertile Crescent. In villages and cities of southern Mesopotamia, groves of date palms were common, often with vegetables such as onions, garlic, and cucumbers growing in the shade of the palm trees. The dates were eaten either fresh or dried, providing vital sugars and vitamins. Palmwood was also used in crafts , but not in construction.

Harvest & Storage

Harvest required significant manpower, as there was immense time pressure on completing the harvest before winter set in. Grain was cut with a sickle, dried in shacks, and threshed by driving animals over it to "tread out" the grain. After threshing, the grain was separated from the chaff by winnowing, which was only possible in windy weather. The grain was then either stored in granaries or transported away along the waterways (sometimes even exported to other countries). In the granaries, mongooses were used to protect the store from mice (more so than cats, which were deemed unreliable).

The crop yields of agricultural economies in ancient Mesopotamia were roughly comparable to what traditional Middle Eastern farmers achieved in the 19th and early 20th centuries CE, prior to the advent of modern agricultural practices. Mesopotamia was home to one of the most plentiful agricultural systems in the ancient world.

Agriculture & the Rise of Empires

The societies of Mesopotamia depended largely on agriculture and access to water. Initially, the majority of the land was owned by the palace and the temples, but in the 18th century BCE, large swathes of land were privatized. The smallest unit of land was the ilkum , which was leased by the temple or the palace to a smallholding family. Even though it was legally not inheritable, de facto , the same tenancy agreement continued across multiple generations.

An agricultural surplus was essential to the creation of the first cities and urban societies. Only when farmers' crop yields exceeded their subsistence needs was it possible to sustain the needs of cities. In Mesopotamian society, rulers were very concerned with crop yields as stability and food supply were key to legitimizing their rule. Large canal networks and aqueducts were planned and managed by the state in order to ensure the supply of water to its subjects. Political continuity was paramount to the region's economic well-being, as any break in the dynastic order could cause serious interruption of agricultural activities as well as trade , sometimes with disastrous consequences for the poor.

Recent studies suggest that the rise of centralized states in Mesopotamia (and elsewhere in the world) specifically depended on the abundance of cereal grains that could be levied in taxes to then be transported, stored, and redistributed by the government. In regions of the world where the primary crop consisted of more perishable root or tube vegetables, centralized government arose much later than in regions where the primary crop consisted of grains with a long shelf-life.

It is thanks to agriculture and the abundance of cereals that the great city -states and empires of Mesopotamia were able to rise. Supporting a large-scale urban population and the division of labor into specialized trades was only possible by moving away from subsistence farming to an organized agricultural system that provided enough surplus to feed a large non-farming population. In that sense, agriculture laid the foundation for civilization.

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Bibliography

• DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago | UCL News - UCL – University College London , accessed 20 Sep 2022.
• Edzard, Dietz Otto. Geschichte Mesopotamiensßen. Beck C. H., 2009.
• Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens. Harper, 2020.
• Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, and Luigi Pascali. "The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?." Journal of Political Economy , Volume 130, Number 4, April 2022.
• Leick, Gwendolyn. The A to Z of Mesopotamia . Scarecrow Press, 2010.
• Michael Jursa. "Agriculture, Ancient Near East." The Encyclopedia of Ancient History , edited by Bagnall, Roger S. et al. Blackwell Publishing, 2013
• Von Soden, W. The Ancient Orient. William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1996, 97-103.

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Crabben, J. v. d. (2023, March 22). Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent & Mesopotamia . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/9/agriculture-in-the-fertile-crescent--mesopotamia/

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Crabben, Jan van der. " Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent & Mesopotamia ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 22 Mar 2023. Web. 13 Sep 2024.

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Essay on Agriculture for Students and Children

500+ words essay on agriculture.

Agriculture is one of the major sectors of the Indian economy. It is present in the country for thousands of years. Over the years it has developed and the use of new technologies and equipment replaced almost all the traditional methods of farming. Besides, in India, there are still some small farmers that use the old traditional methods of agriculture because they lack the resources to use modern methods. Furthermore, this is the only sector that contributed to the growth of not only itself but also of the other sector of the country.

Growth and Development of the Agriculture Sector

India largely depends on the agriculture sector. Besides, agriculture is not just a mean of livelihood but a way of living life in India. Moreover, the government is continuously making efforts to develop this sector as the whole nation depends on it for food.

For thousands of years, we are practicing agriculture but still, it remained underdeveloped for a long time. Moreover, after independence, we use to import food grains from other countries to fulfill our demand. But, after the green revolution, we become self-sufficient and started exporting our surplus to other countries.

Besides, these earlier we use to depend completely on monsoon for the cultivation of food grains but now we have constructed dams, canals, tube-wells, and pump-sets. Also, we now have a better variety of fertilizers, pesticides, and seeds, which help us to grow more food in comparison to what we produce during old times.

With the advancement of technology, advanced equipment, better irrigation facility and the specialized knowledge of agriculture started improving.

Furthermore, our agriculture sector has grown stronger than many countries and we are the largest exporter of many food grains.

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Significance of Agriculture

It is not wrong to say that the food we eat is the gift of agriculture activities and Indian farmers who work their sweat to provide us this food.

In addition, the agricultural sector is one of the major contributors to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and national income of the country.

Also, it requires a large labor force and employees around 80% of the total employed people. The agriculture sector not only employees directly but also indirectly.

Moreover, agriculture forms around 70% of our total exports. The main export items are tea, cotton, textiles, tobacco, sugar, jute products, spices, rice, and many other items.

Negative Impacts of Agriculture

Although agriculture is very beneficial for the economy and the people there are some negative impacts too. These impacts are harmful to both environments as the people involved in this sector.

Deforestation is the first negative impact of agriculture as many forests have been cut downed to turn them into agricultural land. Also, the use of river water for irrigation causes many small rivers and ponds to dry off which disturb the natural habitat.

Moreover, most of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides contaminate the land as well as water bodies nearby. Ultimately it leads to topsoil depletion and contamination of groundwater.

In conclusion, Agriculture has given so much to society. But it has its own pros and cons that we can’t overlook. Furthermore, the government is doing his every bit to help in the growth and development of agriculture; still, it needs to do something for the negative impacts of agriculture. To save the environment and the people involved in it.

FAQs about Essay on Agriculture

Q.1 Name the four types of agriculture? A.1 The four types of agriculture are nomadic herding, shifting cultivation, commercial plantation, and intensive subsistence farming.

Q.2 What are the components of the agriculture revolution? A.2 The agriculture revolution has five components namely, machinery, land under cultivation, fertilizers, and pesticides, irrigation, and high-yielding variety of seeds.

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